Valley of the Shadow: A Novel (33 page)

They left the trees, a shabby gray line, solemn.

“Must admit, I’m not fond of the odds,” Payne said to Lee. “Always fancy a pleasant gallop, though.”

Lee nodded his assent. Payne rose again.

“Charge, Virginia!”
the attorney-in-arms shouted.
“Charge!”

Ants attacking a buffalo herd, Lee thought. Mean ants, though.

As they came to a gallop, the cavalrymen began screeching their Rebel yell. Some cursed ferociously, doing down the Devil himself and unleashing every shred of anger they’d ever known and held in. Lashing mounts that caught their desperation, the men drew carbines or revolvers, or unsheathed sabers, each turning to the weapon he had left.

The harvested field beneath their hooves had dried well enough, if not fully. It didn’t much slow the horses, but caked mud flew everywhere, stinging faces and eyes.

They pounded into a depression, briefly losing sight of the advancing Yankees, and Lee had to slap down a dizzy fit before jumping the stream that meandered through the low ground.

They crested another field and, dear Lord, the Yankees spread before them in a multitude.

No man faltered, not one.

At first the Yankees hardly seemed to notice them. Or care. As if they were ants, indeed, or maybe nothing but a billow of blackflies. Belatedly, a Union regiment posted as skirmishers closed ranks.

Too late.

“Virginia! Virginia!”
Payne cried, echoed by dozens of voices.

Remembering their pride, remembering that they had served under Stuart, the men charged as if not one cared for his life, devil-may-care as they had been in the early days of the war, when all things seemed a lark.

Lee just hoped he could stay in the saddle. He knew he couldn’t wield a saber—his pistol would have to do. Above all, he did not intend to give the Yankees the pleasure of taking him prisoner.

The sickness that gripped him could not cloud his reason: He knew he should not have ridden forward himself. But the time for reason had passed.

As they closed on the Yankee skirmishers, Lee began to shout with the others, another madman in a hopeless world. His worn horse pounded to burst its heart.

They smashed into the Yankees, shooting and slashing, and tore through them, leaving empty saddles and bloodied blue-bellies in their wake.

“Don’t stop!” Lee shouted
. “Charge, charge!”

Payne was shouting, too.

Lee felt he might vomit over himself and his horse. The horizon wavered. But he shouted again and again between bouts of choking.

The Virginians swarmed forward, almost merry in their hatred now, their sullenness vanquished, their souls exhilarated. When more Yankee regiments spurred out to meet them, the collision cracked like doors slamming in Hell.

Reins tight in a left hand going numb, Lee shot a captain through the heart and swung his pistol across his horse’s mane to fend off a sergeant. Nearby, two men skewered each other at the same moment, each man’s blade propping up the other on their bewildered horses. It took but a minute for the Yankees to break.

Cheering, the Virginians—fewer now—followed after them. Billy Payne hallooed, as if riding to the family hounds back in Fauquier County.

“Virginia! Virginia!”

They pounded over another harvested field, hard on the tails of the Yankees. The bluecoats emptied their pistols toward them, firing wildly back over their saddles.

How many rounds had he fired? Lee tried to remember.

Near him, a horse collapsed, hurling its rider over its head.

“Come on, Nellie Gray,” Lee urged his own horse. “There’s oats on earth and plenty of corn in Heaven.”

Who had said that?
His father.
The words had leapt out of him.

“Virginia!”

A jolly, deadly steeplechase ensued. They chased the shattered Yankees for a half mile, then more.

Lee knew it was time to stop, to re-form. They had become scattered, disordered. These men had done all that they could, it was time to call off the pursuit.

He also knew that it was already too late.

A band, all too near, struck up “Yankee Doodle.”

The men they had chased re-formed behind a fresh blue wall of troopers. To the left, where that infernal music sounded, a full brigade, in perfect order, emerged from a swale in the earth.

Red scarves. Custer’s men. The scum who killed Stuart.

Lee’s dizziness left him. They were
not
going to kill him. Not those sonsofbitches.

He reined up. Fifty yards off, Payne drew back, too, calling for his Virginians to re-form. Too late, too late.

The Union cavalrymen to their front had divided, some dismounting with their carbines, while others rallied to countercharge. But the worst threat, Lee sensed, came from Custer’s brigade. Who, unlike their brethren, did not draw pistols or carbines, but came on with their hundreds of sabers flashing.

In front, prancing before that brigade’s flags, a black stallion bore a floppy-hatted officer with long locks.

Kill him myself,
Lee swore.

But he knew he would not, could not. His purpose now had to be to rescue what remained of Payne’s command.

“Yankee Doodle” was a hateful tune.

He heard a shout of “Wolverines!” And that minstrel-show officer, Custer, waved
l’arme blanche
.

Sabers leveled, Custer’s brigade thundered at them from the flank. The Yankees to their front charged them as well.

Gathering back into a herd meant to serve as a formation, Payne’s survivors didn’t need orders to withdraw. They turned back south and gave their mounts the spurs.

They didn’t get far before reining in again. A double line of blue horsemen blocked their retreat.

Custer’s brigade wasted no time crashing down on them from the flank, men with sabers undeterred by men with empty revolvers. Lee fired his pistol until it clicked uselessly, then swung it at the troopers nearest him, hammering his way through. Sabers hacked flesh, and men died shouting obscenities. Fighting stirrup to stirrup, knee to knee, they splashed one another with sweat and blood, and faces foretold the hate and pain of damnation. Gray coats went under in a sea of blue.

Overwhelmed, Payne led his horsemen in a last charge back across the ground they had recently crossed with so much pride, riding headlong at the double line of Yankee cavalrymen in their path.

“Come on, you,” Lee urged his horse. He spurred and lashed it, something he had not had to do in years: The beast was near quits.

Another crash of men, mounts, and metal, then a remainder of a remnant of Payne’s troopers had, miraculously, broken through the lines blocking their retreat.

They rode hard. More horses collapsed. The Yankees pursued. Vengeful.

Asking the last of their horses, the Virginians made the woods from which they had charged. Fragments of other units awaited them there and did their best to halt the Yankees, but the bluecoats were unstoppable.

Lee tried to rally Payne’s men for a final stand, but they were finished for now. He rode with them rearward, evading the Yankees, sick in body, sick in heart, hoping he might still gather enough men for one final stand.

Behind him, the Yankee bands struck up again.

TWELVE

September 19, 3:00 p.m.

North of Red Bud Run

Rud Hayes halted his men and formed them in line of battle ten yards inside the tree line, out of sight. Then he waited.

“You didn’t answer my question,” his brother-in-law pestered. “You
still
think we can overcome the animus, put this country back together … as one nation? You really think that, Rud? After all this?”

“Yes,” Hayes said, looking at his pocket watch.

“Well, then,” Doc Joe said, “Lucy ought to make you wear a dunce cap.” He stroked his horse’s neck, soothing the beast. “This country won’t be united in a hundred years. Too much killing, too much hate.”

“Good men will repair it.”

“The best men are dead.”

“Thank you, Doctor, for that encouraging diagnosis. Joe, go on back to your surgery. You’ll be busy enough before long, and I’m busy now.”

Joe smiled. “All right. But no tomfoolery. My sister wouldn’t make a kindly widow.”

“Just git.”

“Boils tolerable?”

“You just git.”

After Doc Joe turned his horse, Russ Hastings sidled up. The adjutant’s horse, Old Whitey, was admired throughout the brigade. “I thought we were going right in, sir?”

“General Crook doesn’t want to go in headlong.”

Neither man said anything about Kernstown, that hard-learned lesson.

And yes, the boils were tolerable. But sitting in a saddle was no delight.

The sounds of battle back across the creek were tired, grudging. But men were still dying. Hayes turned toward the soldiers he commanded, scanning the features of those who would lead the attack. Most faces were familiar to some degree. Not all, but most. What always struck him, once a man looked past the enforced uniformity, was that such men weren’t uniform at all, not in the least. Each was complete unto himself. Distinct. Filled with yearnings, fears, and considerations as mundane as a fellow wishing he’d taken that last chance to drop his drawers and squat.
Human.

He had begun to accept that his idol, Emerson, was far from a perfect guide to the human species. Introducing Swedenborg in
Representative Men,
Emerson had scorned the commoners “of the world of corn and money.” But was any man truly common? Deserving of such condescension? The man who labored with his hands fed the man who worked with his mind. Wasn’t one of the points of this war that all men should enjoy an equal right not only to freedom and justice, but to respect? Hayes would not dismiss the man who shouldered a rifled musket as lower in worth than one of greater intellect. These, his fellow citizens, the men he led in a fratricidal war … each possessed the same spark of life as Emerson, but these men had, the most of them, volunteered to risk that spark, that life, for a prospect greater than themselves, a vision few commanded the words to describe, but which they felt profoundly. Emerson and his ilk discussed ideas. These men would go forward and
die
for an idea, because they sensed instinctively it was right. Who was the worthier?

He took a drink from his canteen. His aide copied the action.

“Stay close to me, Russ,” Hayes said. “When this thing starts.”

The frail breeze could not pierce the grove. Flags hung limp. Men rustled and murmured. Waiting. That was somehow the worst of it, the waiting. Men wanted to
know,
that was the thing. The idled mind was the domain of devils.

Across the fields, a Rebel battery limbered up to leave. Were they aware of the impending attack? Had surprise already been lost?

His brigade would go forward, anyway.

He wondered what Lucy was doing at that moment. He hadn’t had a letter from her in days. Had her pregnancy grown troubled? He always feared for her, not for himself. The slightness of his fate, amid all this, seemed a trivial matter.

“Sign me a leave to go home this minute, Colonel,” a soldier called, “and I’ll vote for you in every single election.”

Before Hayes could reply, another soldier added, “Let
me
go, and I’ll vote for you
twice
come election time.”

Men laughed. That was good.

“Wouldn’t mind going home myself,” Hayes admitted. “But I’m told we have some pressing business hereabouts.”

These good men.

Thrashing back in the trees. Riders. Colonel Duval, the division commander, and his party.

Time to go in?

Kicking thorns away from his trouser legs, Duval steered his horse through the briars.

“Rud,” Duval said.

“Isaac.” Hayes lifted his hat and settled it again. “Go in?”

Duval shook his head. “Don’t know what’s holding things up. Crook seemed ready. Then he sent McKinley back to find Sheridan.”

“Well, we’re fixed to go.” Hayes canted his head toward his men.

“I know it’s hard, the waiting,” Duval said. “Makes my skin crawl.”

More ride-through-the-canebrake racket rasped toward them. Hayes recognized Will McKinley. General Crook and a few aides followed after.

This was it, then.

Hayes kept his face impassive, the way a sound man waited out the vote count. He admired Crook. Sheridan had the effect of lightning on men who barely knew him, but Crook inspired loyalty in those who knew him well. He was a just man, George Crook, and fairness eluded the common run of generals, all of whom played favorites. Above all, when he made a mistake, Crook took responsibility. He lived by a code Hayes recognized.

Greetings all around, rendered quickly, by sweat-glazed officers striving not to betray their concerns to the soldiers.

“I see that battery turned tail,” Crook said.

“Just pulled off, sir,” Hayes told him.

Crook nodded. “Not sure that’s a good thing, or a bad thing.” He concentrated on Duval. “Your division ready, Isaac?”